LeRoy Chatfield, lifelong public servant who championed marginalized communities, dies at 92

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Set us as preferred As a teenager, LeRoy Chatfield took an oath with the Congregation of Christian Brothers to live a life of poverty.For the next 16 years, he hardly owned any material possessions and worked for free as a high school teacher in San Francisco and throughout some of the poorest areas in the San Joaquin Valley.

But Chatfield eventually hit a spiritual plateau that organized religion couldn’t fill.He still believed in a life of selflessness, though.

So at 31, with no money, he quit his job, left the order and joined César Chávez’s mission to organize farmworkers.“I just feel that I can no longer work on behalf of social justice at the level of abstraction that my life as a religious teaching Brother seems to indicate,” Chatfield wrote to his superiors in a 1965 letter.“My ever increasing involvement and identification with the poor only continues to widen the gap between my obedience to religious authority and my own understanding of what my life as a Christian must entail.”Forever dedicated to a life of service, Chatfield died of natural causes Sept.

15.He was 92.Kate Chatfield said her father had been in cognitive decline for the last year and had fallen ill on the day of his passing.

She said he died at home, surrounded by his wife and family.“My mother was holding him,” she said over the phone.In a phone interview, former Gov.

Jerry Brown, a longtime friend of Chatfield, said the loss was immeasurable.“This was a man with a dedicated vision to serve those who were less fortunate,” he said.

“I’ve met thousands of people over my 50 years in politics and LeRoy stands tall among them.” Chatfield’s death comes six months after the New York Times revealed allegations that Chávez had groomed and sexually abused underage girls and women within the farmworker movement over several d...